Recombinant Indigeneities: Maori Environmental Design and the Architecture of Biculturalism

This dissertation traces controversies around Maori landscapes in environmental planning, architecture, and urban public space. New Zealand is on the verge of its "post-settlement era": the sitting national government is racing to settle all outstanding treaty claims to land and cultural property by 2016, promising to refashion the relationship between Maori and the Crown from one of historical grievances to one of equitable collaboration and consultation. Yet Maori relationships to landscapes are not stable historical artefacts; they frequently emerge in environmental design projects in new innovative forms, resistant to settlement. I show how design controversies yield complex claims to the landscape that stifle liberal modes of inclusion, as Maori landscapes push open the ostensibly-universal foundations of both environmental design and liberal multiculturalism.;Maori Environmental Design is a professional field in New Zealand, emerging over the past three decades in tandem with a series of legal reforms that guarantee consultation with Maori tribes in environmental planning decisions and, more ambiguously, in the public use of Maori concepts and designs. Maori connections to the landscape are integral to imaginaries of cultural revival, settler nationalism and efforts to produce a unique New Zealand architecture; each of these invokes the term "biculturalism" in differing ways. Environmental design in New Zealand, and in urban public space in particular, rests on the work of comparing Maori and non-Maori landscapes. What counts as unique Maori practices of building and caring for landscapes emerge in these controversies and collaborations, contingent on the project at hand. They thus produce diverse and dynamic bicultural ecologies that unsettle the primacy of ethnicity as the basis of what it means to be indigenous-- a risky but promising proposition that I call "recombinant indigeneities.".